1. Field of the Invention
The invention is directed to a method for preparing and fixing fiber samples to be analyzed optically and to a device for implementing the method.
2. Description of the Prior Art
There are numerous methods and apparatuses for the qualitative and quantitative optical testing of textile fibers. In many test procedures, the irregular fiber material, e.g. cotton flock, cannot be measured immediately, but rather must first be prepared in fiber bands with a parallelized fiber position. Fiber tufts are removed from such fiber bands, which are parallelized beforehand, to serve as a pattern for test devices which require fibers with parallelized fiber position as test material, e.g. optical scanners and image data analysis devices.
Mechanized devices for producing such fiber bands are already known, e.g. according to the Swiss Patent Application No. 01 468/89. The fiber tufts are then produced with commercially available devices, e.g. type FL100/101 or the "Fibrosampler" from the firm of Spinlab.
However, the problem with such devices consists in fixing the fiber samples produced by these devices in their parallelized alignment and distribution in an unchangeable manner up to the point of their actual measurement, but also subsequent to this in order to carry out control or reference measurements.
According to the prior art, e.g. as described in TEXTIL-PRAXIS 1959, issue 4, pages 332-334 "The Cottonometer, a new German fiber length measuring device" [Das Cottonometer, ein neues deutsches Faserlangenmessgerat], the fiber tufts produced with the various devices are inserted in a plexiglass sleeve by hand without special fastening by means of an insertion fork. The disadvantage in this method consists in that the fibers are in an undefined, curled state and the parallelism depends to a great extent on the care of the operator. Moreover, a relatively large quantity of fibers is necessary in order for the fiber sample to be manually transportable at all.